The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 31 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 4 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Severin Hacker: AGI and UBI will replace human jobs in 20 years
“I believe that's gonna happen. Again, the big question is, is when is it gonna be? I don't think it's gonna be next five years. It's not going to be, maybe it's going to be next 10 years if you really see a broad adoption of these technologies, more likely may…”
Hacker: Lower software production costs will lead to more app creation
“And then the other thing it does, it just lowers the cost of lines of code, of software, right? So production, producing software. And then there's the Jervin's paradox, which says, you know, if you, the cost of a good goes down, you will actually have more de…”
Hacker: AI will cause product, engineering, and design roles to converge
“But with AI, you can see that there's maybe like a new role, kind of a product engineer designer, like one person who can do all of these roles to certain, you know, degree, like they can build a prototype and then maybe at some point they need to hand it off …”
Hacker: Computer science degrees will remain a good investment for five years
“I would say for the next five years, probably still like a Good investment.”
Hacker: AI handles 70% to 80% of Duolingo customer support tickets
“And we have found for a lot of the, you know, AI can do 70 to 80% of the tickets that we get.”
Hacker: AI tutors will become the primary learning method in the future
“And by the way, the other thing is like, so I do believe that the AI tutors will become really, really, really good. And it's gonna be the way most people learn most things in the future.”
Severin Hacker: AI will enable companies built with 10x fewer employees
“We're in the middle of this massive transformation. You can build companies with probably 10 times fewer employees.”
Hacker: Pre-2022 art will increase in value as verified human creation
“In, in the art world, I believe that art that was made before 20, 22 is gonna increase in value because it's verified human.”
Duolingo created 148 courses in one year using AI
“It took us, I think, 12 years to build the first hundred courses or so. And now, within one year, we built another 148 courses.”
Hacker: Future learning apps will generate personalized exercises on the fly
“But really, I think the future is going to be quite different where you say like, hey, you know, you might be interested in, in rugby, and you have a trip planned to, I don't know, France. I think France also is, is big into rugby. And, you know, you could the…”
Hacker: Duolingo users would switch to social media over competing apps
“If you ask our users, what do you do if Duolingo went away? They never mentioned any of our language learning competitors. They say, oh, I would spend more time on social media.”
Hacker: Duolingo will not launch standalone apps for new subjects
“No, no, no. No more new apps. If it's education, it goes into the main app.”
Hacker: Duolingo PM built initial chess course prototype using Cursor
“He was able to build this first version just using cursor and a bunch of AI tools. And the prototype is what convinced us that we should do this.”
Hacker: Duolingo built its chess course in a record nine months
“Because of AI, again, we were able to build this within nine months. This is fastest way ever created a new course.”
Hacker: AI will never motivate students on why learning matters
“It's like an AI will never tell you like why you should learn this. It's like the help you learn it, but it's not going to tell you know, why should I learn this? Why is this important?”
Hacker: Luis von Ahn initially resisted hiring product managers at Duolingo
“I was the one who pushed for hiring our first product manager. It was actually interesting because Luis at the time, he's like, oh, we don't need product managers. He's, he had seen some of them at Google. His previous company was acquired by Google. So he had…”
Hacker: Duolingo ran ~300 A/B experiments on its streak mechanic
“We've probably run 300 experiments fine-tuning the streak mechanic, and that's where you get the gains in retention, and that's what ultimately drives the growth of Duolingo”
Hacker: Human-to-human interaction value will rise significantly despite AI
“No, I, that, that I don't believe, I don't, in fact, I think, no, I think the human to human interaction, the value of that will go up significantly.”
Hacker: The future of educational content will be 100% multimodal
“I think it's going to be multimodal. A hundred percent.”
Severin Hacker: AI hallucinations are not a problem for Duolingo
“Not a problem if they hallucinate, because we teach languages. As long as the language is correct, grammatically correct, it is okay, you know, if it makes up a historical fact. It's, we don't teach history. It's like, hallucinations are not a problem for our …”
Hacker: Duolingo aims for its score to become standard language proficiency metric
“One thing we're also very passionate about is, is the Duolingo score. I'm not sure if you notice it within Duolingo, but we now give you a score, like how good you are at this language. And we want this to become the way people talk about language proficiency.…”
Hacker: CEO Luis von Ahn still attends most Duolingo product reviews
“He still does. So that's a founder mode for him. It's like he's still in most of the product reviews. And I think that's rare for a company CEO of a company like our size, where the CEO sits in most of the product reviews.”
Hacker: Duolingo was once bigger on TikTok than Nike
“I think at some point we were bigger on TikTok than Nike.”
Hacker: Language learning startups predictably grow fast and then fail
“Every single year there was one or two companies that grow really fast in, in language learning, one or two, and inevitably they go down again.”
Duolingo was an launch partner for OpenAI's GPT-4 release
“We were one of the launch partners of OpenAI when they first launched GPT-IV”
Product, Engineering, and Design Account for 70%-80% of Duolingo's Workforce
“Inside Duolingo, we have the three biggest functions within Duolingo are product, Engineering and design. Okay. Those compose probably about. 80%, 70 to 80% of our workforce.”
Hacker: Duolingo sees massive engagement drops whenever push notification services fail
“Still makes a huge difference, and we know because whenever the service goes down that sends the push notifications, you can see the dip. Yeah, yeah, yeah, a hundred percent. It's huge. It's massive.”
Hacker: Duolingo proactively restored user streaks during Iberian power outages
“By the way, also when there's, you know, there was a power outage in, in Portugal and Spain, we proactively extended their streak, so, so they don't lose it.”